Knot on Call Blog Tuesday 21st November

A beautiful starlit night with the wind falling away and the sea state calm - time to put the engine on and incur a time penalty. The trick is to beat the system. For every hour the engine is on you have to count 2 hours so you have to more than double your speed without burning too much diesel and go in the direction you need to go, that way you get to your waypoint more than twice as quickly as if you were sailing.

Morning broke with views of Mars ( or was it Venus) and a beautiful sun rise but still no wind. Time for some house keeping, check the rigging for any wear and tear, check the fruit and Veg to get rid of the rotten ones. Open the engineering workshop to repair the damaged foresail block and of course update the weather forecasts and sailing plan.

We are using Chris Tibbs, an experienced round the world yachtsman and meteorologist to help us plan the passage and find the best wind. We send him an email with current position and sailing conditions and he looks at alternative routings and weather systems. The wind we had been chasing yesterday had vanished and new wind had arrived a bit earlier in the west. If we changed course from south westerly to westerly, we would find wind sooner, shorten the distance to our destination and burn less diesel. Seemed like a win win so off we went in the new direction, shortly to be followed by most of the yachts nearby, did they know we were using an expert!

Technology is truly amazing, we send a short email at two in the morning and within a couple of minutes we get an email back with a small Grib file attached. Open that on the laptop with Predict Wind Offshore and we get a 2 day moving weather and wind map of our chosen area to play the animations and plan where we will be at any point in time. 

Enjoying the light airs and sunshine a small pod of dolphins swam by and stopped for a brief play and we tried to take a noon sight using the sextant - hmmm, the theory is fine but in practice - work in progress! Sure enough the wind appeared mid afternoon and off we went under sail again. After another great dinner we set the sails for night time and those not on watch got an early sleep.